


Lost and Found

by voidknight



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Descent into Madness, Gen, Identity Issues, Reality Bending, Surreal, The Spiral, canon typical distortion weirdness, impossible geometry, more or less?, the inherent horror of liminal spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24620749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidknight/pseuds/voidknight
Summary: Helen Richardson is a wanderer, lost in the fractal hallways and lost in her own mind.But aren't those the same thing now?
Comments: 15
Kudos: 23





	Lost and Found

The sensation of _time_ sloughs off Helen Richardson’s shoulders like droplets from the wings of a bird. Her sense of _space_ has begun to fall apart as well, as worldly realities are jogged and pried from her mind with each new throbbing footstep. It is not just an indifference to the passage of time, or the slippage that results when one has no way to mark it: she feels utterly disconnected from a world in which time could be allowed to pass at all.

The only real windows in this place look out on new corridors. Or old corridors, sometimes. Or they show her the back of her own head, let her watch herself peer through a panel that may or may not be glass. Either way, she has had no glimpses of the Outside, and the idea that there could even _be_ an Outside seems like a distant memory.

How long has she been wandering?

It doesn’t really matter; it matters even less than the question of the world that is not branching hallways and impossible rooms and doors and doors and doors. Funny, to call it a _world._ To imply that this place is a _world_ as well. If anything, it is the opposite of a world. It is the constant promise of entrance into a space that means something, anything at all, rather than one that is simply populated with reminders of her own journey. A hallway must lead somewhere, a door must lead somewhere, a flight of stairs must lead _somewhere_ . In the Real World, they do. Here, they lead into each other. Like a waterfall that flows into itself. Like Penrose stairs, a construct which she has frequently found herself traversing. A building with no purpose. But to call this place a _building_ would be in error, of course.

Must a building have a purpose? Helen is fairly familiar with _buildings._ Specifically, she is fairly familiar with _homes._

 _Home_ is a funny concept to Helen. She has been selling _homes_ to people for years, and yet that’s all business, all about knowing the terms, the trends, the history, the architecture. The _facts._ The thing is that facts aren’t important, especially not in this place. Can Helen look at a clean, polished, artificial house and frame it in her mind as a place that someday some owner will call a home? Sure. But it’s just her imagination. She is well aware of the fact that the spaces she sells don’t belong to her. That is, in some way, the whole point. She is detached, and thoughtfully so.

She still loves the houses that she has spent so much of her life studying. _(Properties—_ a word that defines itself by the concept of ownership, something that means nothing in this place.) But there is a stark difference between loving a house and loving a home.

Can she remember her own home, now? It was a flat in London, a nice one, a roomy one. It had big rooms and big windows and a nice desk made out of a rich brown wood she couldn’t name. The walls were painted robin’s egg blue, and there was a couch in the living room where she always sat to read the newspaper.

Familiarity with a space can carve it into your mind, filling its dimensions and extremities with tones and hues of emotion. Her home is her home; she has passed through it so many times that she cannot imagine it as anything else. She loves the small supermarket by her house. The way it always seems to smell like her favorite cheese, the way that the boxes and cartons always feel so organically stacked. She hates the hospital waiting room. Bad memories hang in the air there, clinging to the pale turquoise walls, wafting from the patterned rug. Places give emotions weight, give them _form,_ allow them to surround you as you plant yourself within walls stained with memories.

And if that is true, then the hallways are—

Blank. They have texture but it is not _real;_ nothing about them conjures up any sort of connection or memory in Helen’s brain. They have begun to seem less like architecture designed and crafted by a human mind, human hands, and more like the outputs of a generational algorithm. A not-mind that has decided what a hallway should look like.

Alien. This space is wrong. This space is not how space works. This is not a place; it is a pre-place, a loading screen with infinite pixels.

Horrifying. For reasons that go beyond their impossible nature, how they twist and change and betray your senses even when you think you’re used to it. There’s the fact that she’s alone, and the fact that it feels like she’s never alone, like the space _breathes_ and thrums with a heartbeat that clogs up the crevices of her mind with whirling music.

But there is also something to be said about _familiarity._ That she has been placed into a structure that is familiar to her. A hallway. She has been down many hallways in her life. Would it be scarier if she did not know where she was? If the whole space was shrouded in darkness? No, she is caught in the uncanny valley between knowing and not-knowing, enough to answer the _what_ but not the _why._ It is precisely her (so very human) familiarity with the concept of a _hallway_ that keeps her teetering on the edge of acceptance.

The unknown she can accept. This is something else.

* * *

Delirium comes and goes in waves, but eventually, Helen finds herself settling into a state _between._ She sleeps sometimes, even though there is no substantial difference between sleeping and waking here—and sleep doesn’t ward off the haze that has become an irrevocable veil over her own perception. She no longer needs to eat. Despite her constant walking, her feet are never sore. Her clothes never begin to chafe against her skin.

After some time—

She sits at the bottom of an aimless stairwell and looks at the floor. At the sickly yellow of the carpet, at the undefined edges of the thick rug. At how they swim and dance if she unfocuses her eyes.

 _I would quite like to have a body again,_ she thinks, and quickly realizes how absurd that wish is. When she presses her fingertips together she feels warmth. When she touches the stair she feels coldness. And her hair is as coiled and curly as ever, and her teeth feel clean even though she hasn’t washed them, and nothing aches except her head.

Because it doesn’t want her to _hurt._ It just needs her to _fear._

And sure, her heart flutters as it has done all this while, and the tiny pool of dread has made itself at home in her stomach, but…

Is she afraid? Is she truly afraid? It is hard to be afraid all the time, and certainly not from one source of terror. Maybe _acceptance_ is a more complicated notion than she thought.

* * *

The corridors are swathed in a feverish heat, one that shakes Helen to her bones. They are never stuffy. A small, closed-off room could be stuffy. This space is anything but closed-off.

At times she feels like she is dragging herself through a swamp. But the muggy air is only in her mind, and if her feet begin to teeter it is because of her own nausea, not an unsteady ground.

What was it like to perceive reality? It must have felt nice. Solid, comfortable. To know that a wall is a wall, that it will not come away in wads when she claws at it. To know the sizes of things. To be sure which way is up or down or right or left.

* * *

She is back in the domain of mirrors. A deja vu swells through her once she realizes where she is—of course, she didn’t notice the shift, didn’t notice when the halls became flat again rather than peppered with staircases, didn’t notice the first framed painting depicting the corridor from above. But, now, she finds herself traversing a space that is a little more familiar than the rest of the curling hallways.

Is this the area she entered into when her fingers met the handle of that impossible door? It’s a laughable assumption, that she could find herself in the same place twice. Like the corridors don’t shift too much for something like that to be possible. But there is a creeping curiosity in the back of her mind. That maybe, if she looked hard enough, she could find the exact spot where the hall reaches a dead end and there is only the mirror that once framed her trapped panic.

There are plenty of mirrors here, but she has trouble seeing herself when she looks at them. It is difficult to distinguish her form from the patterns on the wallpaper.

* * *

Sometimes, Helen wakes up enough to _remember,_ in sharp detail, what happened to her.

A new house and a new door and a tall man who smiled like a statue and laughed like an echo. A trapping and a twisting and an entanglement, wringing out her mind like a damp cloth. A crawling uncertainty that has never left her. Fear. Horror. Adrenaline that comes from more than just her body. A shattering, an exit, the coldness of reality, the daze of a hospital.

The realization that the real world didn’t work how it used to. Something changed. Something stripped away her sense of direction, left her lost, wandering in too-real streets as if they were the corridors she had been so eager to escape.

A taxi and a man with eyes like whirlpools into unknown depths and a dizzying drive and a building and an Archive. The Archivist—kind, patient, _trusting._ Trusting her when she didn’t trust herself. A map and a statement and words curving into a hollow attempt at an explanation.

The wrong door, an inevitable collapse, pulling her back in.

_There was never a door there; your mind plays tricks on you._

Who called her towards those doors? Why did she choose to accept the dare? It wasn’t forced upon her. It was her own decision. Did something inside of her know how it would end, a little voice that pushed her to confront her fear, telling her that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to just _let go_ of it all? To let herself get lost? No, of course not, that’s absurd.

But it’s all absurd. Everything here. Everything anywhere.

At least she doesn’t have to try and make sense of it.

And in these moments when a sliver of reality fixes itself in her mind—like a thread connecting her to the world beyond, an impossible text message beamed into her brain even though there is no reception here—she realizes just how accepting of her situation she has become. It’s these moments that the panic truly hits, the fear of irreversible change, the fear of stagnation, and above all the fear that nothing of her old life was ever real. Because as she examines her own thoughts, asks herself about her _old life,_ who she was, what she would miss, she finds that she misses it like she would miss a good book, a long-running TV show that was canceled unexpectedly. There is a mundane kind of horror in the realization that something that you used to care so much about doesn’t mean much to you anymore.

And what good will rationalizing it all do for her? She could tell herself she’s back at the hospital, she’s in a coma, she’s dreaming, she’s hallucinating, she’s mad. But when it comes down to it she doesn’t understand why _explanation_ has to be so tempting. There is only one thing she can know right now, and that is her own subjective experience, contradictory and nonsensical as it may be. There is no reason to force it into a framework that the very architecture of this place does not support.

* * *

There are other people here, other wanderers like her. She is never scared of them. She watches them from a distance, studying their motions, the way they traipse along like she once did. Not that she has any more of a purpose now, or anywhere to go.

When she interacts with them, these meetings go one of three ways.

One. She talks to them and they do not respond, because they are little more than a construct of the hallways. A walking collection of shapes and patterns. Have they forgotten how to speak? Or, when strings of words begin to flow from their lips, dripping and writhing and utterly devoid of meaning, she considers that perhaps _she_ is the one who has forgotten how to speak.

(Is speech a falsehood? Writing is one, that’s for certain. Perhaps language itself is a lie—the compression of thought into a system that tries to make sense, that attempts to fit rules to pure chaos.)

Two. A conversation occurs. Something short and nonsensical.

She finds herself asking if they’ve seen the hall of mirrors. The what? The hall of mirrors. The ones that distort your body, stretch and squeeze it into new shapes. Don’t all mirrors do that? No? Maybe your body is wrong. Maybe the mirrors are lying.

Or they ask where she came from. She says she came from _away._ They nod like this makes sense.

Or they ask about the figure they’ve seen, the one with the sharp hands. She can’t remember his name. It’s on the tip of her tongue, but this place quietly tugs it from her, and what spills from her mouth is not a name, or anything, really.

Three. They talk to her and she does not respond, because she is little more than a construct of the hallways.

* * *

She learns how to speak again. How to bend language to her advantage. Twist it into those spirals that must comprise the atomic structure of this place.

* * *

There is a room here with three chairs lined up in a row. It is small and compact; Helen’s head is maybe a foot from the ceiling. Or it would be, if the dimensions of the room ceased their shifting for a moment.

Are the chairs waiting for something? Will something happen if she sits in one? She could spend an eternity in here. Just waiting. Staring at the door that leads in and leads out. It is a dead end. Meaningless. Random.

* * *

There is a room here with a bed and a ceiling fan. There is no light, but the room illuminates itself as if there were. Helen cannot tell if there are any shadows.

She lays down on the glitching, wriggling fabric and pretends to sleep.

When she pretends to wake up, she is slumped against the wall of another room, a room with no exits. She finds her way back to the hallways anyway.

* * *

The furniture is never _real_ furniture, of course. The abstraction of a chair, the abstraction of a bed, the abstraction of a hallway. Perhaps this is what a _platonic ideal_ is. A simple shape made of simple shapes. No brand names; she could not recognize the architect.

* * *

Nothing _breaks_ here, which is worse than if it did. Nothing breaks, only transforms. Twists. A cup, upon being thrown to the floor, should shatter, not bounce or distort or deform itself like jelly. An object cannot be real if it cannot be destroyed, right?

* * *

There is a room here with a bed and the ugliest wallpaper she has ever seen. She knows what good wallpaper looks like; she would like to call herself an expert in such things. This one is yellow and peeling, torn off in great clumps. A complex, sprawling pattern is imprinted upon it, curves and angles that never seem to go anywhere, and yet they do—they travel far enough that Helen can trace her finger along them for hours. When the pattern repeats itself, it does so in a way that feels wrong, the strokes of a careless artist. There is no symmetry. No beauty.

Maybe it is alive. Maybe, as Helen follows the lines, she is carving through it, rendering, awakening something within the wall, deepening the marks of the horrid creeping shapes, making them clearer, more whole.

It seems to _shift,_ undulate under her fingers. Meaningless and maddening.

If she were to take it by the edges and peel it further, what would she find singing behind it? More wall? Another door? Another impossibility? Another pattern?

Maybe an escape. Maybe she came from a pattern and she will return to the pattern in the end.

The lines stretch on and on and they do not stop.

* * *

Helen is safe here. Nothing is coming to hurt her, hunt her down, kill her. (As if she is real enough to kill.) Not even the distorted figure with the bulbous hands and the smile that pierces through its dimensions.

Maybe there is no Minotaur in this Labyrinth.

Is she home? Has she found her place within the corkscrew halls?

She creeps like the woman in the wallpaper and she finds that she is not afraid.

* * *

The thin, swirling figure stands just before a forking crossroads. It has fractals instead of hands and spirals instead of eyes. It smiles at Helen. She has seen its smile in too many mirrors.

She is not afraid of it either. No more than she is afraid of the corridors.

“What are you?”

“Don’t mind me,” it says. “I’m just a part of the landscape.”

* * *

Can a being be made of deceit if everything around it is unreal? A lie is a deliberate twisting. Here they amount to no more than the natural flux of the place. There is no truth, so how can there be lies?

* * *

She drew a map for the Archivist, back when she was a person. It is with a jolt of surprise, an emotion she has not felt in much too long, that she reaches into the pocket of her skirt and finds her fingers closing upon crumpled printer paper, so light that she forgot its weight. The lines that she once scribbled into it are winding and contradictory, but now that she is within the halls, back in the space that she was trying so hard to recall, they seem, amazingly, to make perfect sense.

What can one do with a map of a place that does not exist? Follow it, of course.

* * *

There is a room here that is not a room, with walls that connect only sometimes, with no floor and two ceilings.

There is a room here that is covered in coiling fractals, painted by the stroke of a maddened hand.

There is a room here that is made entirely of bubbling clay, that forms impossible shapes as it slithers through itself, warping and molding.

There is a room here that is made of doors.

There is a room here that is made of nothing.

* * *

Maybe the halls are like veins. Whose veins? The veins of the man who is not a man with winding hair and branching fingers? Is she the blood running through them? Could she cause a clot?

* * *

The patterns of the wallpaper have begun to creep across the floor, onto her shoes, up her legs.

* * *

It is never silent here. The white noise jitters in her ears and in her vision, seethes through the air, carves squirming shapes there.

* * *

Even the rug has fallen away now.

Perhaps this is what it is like to exist in another dimension. The space has stopped pretending to be anything remotely human. Maybe Helen clipped through a wall and fell out of bounds. Maybe those forever-winding stairs led her to a secret basement. It’s only half-built, after all. The architect has not put a lot of work into this one.

But as she walks, she feels herself _creating_ the space, breathing life into it—no, not life. This is something that goes beyond life. This is the essence of possibility. A world that is not limited by the mind. That cares not for stability or geometry or the angles of classical euclidean architecture.

Each footstep makes the hallway real. Or, perhaps, sculpts a dream out of nothingness.

And Helen has ears in the walls, and she can hear a twisting speech in a familiar voice, and it talks of betrayal and becoming.

_—and the others of it is not what it is—_

_—so ecstatic was my completeness, I did not—_

_—lines overlapping and inverting—_

_—being opened and remade—_

_—pointlessness—_

_—failure—_

She breaks into a sprint. The words come to her with no regard for time or meaning, and yet she _knows,_ somehow, that she is approaching a breaking point, that the walls are thin here. Thin enough to shatter. The corridors twist in whatever direction she chooses to tread. Space itself catches on her shoulders, her elbows, her pounding feet.

There is a new door.

Maybe she was never heading towards an escape. Maybe she was moving like liquid in a chrysalis. Entangling herself in—

Creating, emerging—

Houses and properties and _homes._ She has traveled through a thousand buildings. It is time that she take a more active role.

Maybe she was the architect all along.

Out there—where? —is the voice of someone who was kind to her once. Who allowed her to settle her twisting thoughts and put them down on paper. Allowed her to lose her way. And she begins to comprehend the idea of end, and the idea of a beginning. That there is someone worth saving.

Maybe she was an architect that built themself out of clay. Maybe she is the architect and the walls and the floor and the ceiling and the _space._

Lost in the streets and lost in herself. But aren’t those the same thing now?

That veil of haze and confusion, is it lifting? No, she has wrapped herself in it so fully that it has become her clothing. She has transcended it.

There is a new door at the end of the hallway. It is not finished yet. It needs a final touch—the touch of a hand that is not a hand, the touch of the identity that the Distortion was never supposed to have. Doomed, grasping fingers. A paradox to turn her inside out.

Here she is, ready, torn apart and laced back up again. A second chance.

She’s almost there.

The door opens, and Helen opens with it.

**Author's Note:**

> this was VERY fun to write: i love the spiral and i love helen and i love surreal horror! thanks for reading!


End file.
